The Virginia Initiative on Cosmic Origins (VICO) officially began operations on May 1st. VICO is an interdisciplinary research program focussed on the formation of stars, planets and life in the Universe and supported by $1 million from UVa’s Strategic Investment Fund. Led by Prof. Eric Herbst, VICO brings together faculty from the Depts. of Astronomy, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Sciences, and Materials Science & Engineering, as well as the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Incoming University of Virginia astronomy faculty member Ilse Cleeves has been awarded the Annie Jump Cannon Award of the American Astronomical Society for "her groundbreaking work on planet formation and protoplanetary disks. She has established herself as an expert in astrochemical signatures in circumstellar disks."

A team of astronomers, including Jonathan Tan of Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden and the University of Virginia, are using NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy to study the births of massive stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. “Understanding the birth process of massive stars is one of the most important unsolved problems of modern astrophysics, since these stars are so influential throughout our galaxy and beyond.” says Tan.

Dr. John Wilson, a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Astronomy, is the recipient of the 2017 Maria and Eric Muhlmann award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. This award recognizes recent significant observational results made possible by innovative advances in astronomical instrumentation, software, or observational infrastructure and is one of the few in the astronomical world focused on instrumentation.

After 20 years in space, and 13 years orbiting the planet Saturn, the Cassini mission is coming to an end. University of Virginia planetary astronomer Anne Verbiscer, a participating scientist with the mission, is attending this week's end-of-mission celebration at the California Institute of Technology, near NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is enjoying the final ride with hundreds of fellow Cassini scientists.

Professor Trinh Thuan and colleagues recently discovered a dwarf galaxy in the constellation Lynx that is so oxygen-deficient that may serve well as a proxy for better understanding the developing chemistry of the early universe.

On July 17, a primitive solar system object that’s more than 6.5 billion kilometers away passed in front of a distant star as seen from Earth. Twenty-four telescopes and dozens of astronomers, including UVA faculty, staff, and students, were deployed by the New Horizons team to a remote part of Argentina in an effort to catch the shadow of the object - an event that's known as an occulation. Several telescopes, including one operated by UVA astronomer Anne Verbiscer, were in precisely the right place at the right time to catch its fleeting shadow.

Three UVA undergraduates along with Astronomy faculty and staff mentors have returned from South Africa, data in hand, after an attempt to place three UVA telescopes in the path of the shadow of the faint distant Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69 as it passed in front of a distant star. This Kuiper Belt object is the target of a January 1, 2019 flyby by the New Horizons spacecraft, which encountered Pluto in the summer of 2015.

Events

The very first observing run of the Advanced LIGO detectors led to the discovery of binary-black-hole inspiral and merger events, and overnight we got launched into the era of gravitational-wave astrophysics. In this talk I will review the key results from the LIGO data search, signal characterization, and measurements of source properties. I will then discuss how these discoveries open up a brand new field in astronomy and what we can learn about black-hole astrophysics.

One movie, "The 140 Foot Radio Telescope Construction," is a 45 minute
film made in 1964 (will the spherical bearing fit through the Droop
Mountain train tunnel? will the truck carrying the polar shaft make it
over the bridge? will the cranes be able to lift the superstructure?),
and the other, "A Quarter Century of Science on the Meridian," is an 8
minute film about the building of the 300 foot telescope in 1961.